Recently, the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission announced the list of municipal-level key courses for Shanghai universities in 2024. All nine courses recommended by the Shanghai Theatre Academy were approved, achieving a 100% approval rate.
"Novel Adaptation and Grand Drama Structure"
Course Leader: Liu Yanhui
This course is a core professional course for second-year students majoring in Drama and Film Literature. It uses AI screenwriting tools as an aid to guide students in identifying the artistic characteristics of drama, mastering different structural styles of grand drama writing, and integrating these styles into their creations. The course aims to develop students' abilities in plot recognition, theme judgment, and aesthetic analysis, helping them form their own creative concepts and ultimately become thoughtful, expressive playwrights with cultural confidence and humanistic spirit.
"Painting Composition"
Course Leader: Hu Jining
This foundational course for painting majors is interdisciplinary and comprehensive, covering painting psychology, art visual perception, color theory, semiotics, aesthetics, painting creation theory, and AI digital painting. The formal structure of painting composition includes visual symbols and symbolic semantics, reflecting the artist's humanistic thoughts, aesthetic interests, and artistic language. In addition to the essentials of painting composition, the course also integrates the relationship between graphics and picture structure, graphic conception, painting form interest, and color structure.
In the context of the AI era, this course combines cutting-edge technological methods to cultivate students' innovative thinking and advanced professional vision. By leveraging the creative deconstruction, unrestricted thinking, and high-efficiency drawing capabilities of artificial intelligence, the course aims to break the boundaries of art.
"History of Chinese and Foreign Stage Design"
Course Leader: Shi Hao
This course primarily studies the performance design styles of stage art from different eras in China and abroad, analyzing the characteristics of influential and representative theatrical performance spaces, and exploring the development of contemporary theaters. By analyzing stage design through theater forms and combining basic knowledge with AI digital libraries and machine learning technology, the course guides students in deeply understanding the similarities and differences between Eastern and Western theatrical design arts and their mutual integration. It helps students establish a knowledge structure of Chinese and foreign stage design spaces, fostering a stage design concept rooted in Chinese aesthetics with a global perspective, and enhancing students' overall design capabilities and practical innovation skills.
"Classic Repertoire Teaching (Laosheng)"
Course Leader: Yu Xiang
This course is a core component of the Performance (Peking Opera) major. Leveraging the platform advantages of the Shanghai Theatre Academy, the National Peking Opera Company, and the Shanghai Peking Opera Company, it brings together a strong faculty team. The course aligns curriculum reform and teaching design with industry and employer needs, promoting the integration of this major with the cultural industry. It aims to cultivate well-rounded talents in opera performance who can perform, teach, and conduct research, better meeting the multi-level and comprehensive talent needs of the current cultural industry.
The course emphasizes the combination of "theory and practice," enhancing students' performance skills, artistic perception, and overall quality through a blend of on-campus teaching and practical experience in opera troupes. Additionally, it incorporates ideological and political education to foster students' patriotism, cultural confidence, and social responsibility.
"East-West Cross-Cultural Theatre"
Course Leader: Li Minyuan
This course situates Theatre within the broader concept of domestic drama, primarily explaining the theories of directing and acting in theatre spaces, as well as the forms and methods of practical works.
Students will learn how 20th-century Western theatre, influenced by cross-cultural exchanges, sought creative inspiration from the stage performance forms of Eastern theatre. This shift transformed the "Art of Drama," which originally emphasized literary scripts, into the "Art of Theatre," which focuses on spatial performance, resulting in cross-cultural modern theatre works. The course encourages students to reflect on and learn from the theoretical knowledge and practical cases of cross-cultural theatre, recognizing Chinese traditional culture and applying Eastern culture to innovate contemporary theatre with Chinese characteristics in the new era.
"Graduation Creation (1)"
Course Leader: Guo Chenzi
The course focuses on guiding undergraduate students to complete their graduation projects. Building on existing teaching foundations, it aims to broaden and innovate theatrical concepts, striving to connect with the cultural industry and serve cultural construction, moving towards an integration of production, education, and research.
The course has two professional support points. First, it consolidates the basics of playwriting while teaching cutting-edge theories and adding content such as post-dramatic theatre. Second, it uses the history of theatre concepts as an academic background, breaking the single form of drama or film and television scriptwriting with the concept of "grand theatre." It practices new creative forms required by new business models, such as game scripts and immersive theatre scripts.
Shanghai Theatre Academy will further align with the relevant requirements of the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission, using small-scale curriculum reforms to address major issues in talent cultivation models, promoting classroom teaching reform.
